The energy and perseverance of some of those who campaign for forgotten figures of 20th-century British music would put many parliamentary lobbyists to shame. For the past 40 years, the Havergal Brian Society has been one of the most active of these pressure groups, and one of its missions has been to locate the many scores of Brian’s works that were lost during his lifetime – more than a third of his 220 known compositions. One of its early successes was to track down the huge, three-volume score of The Tigers, Brian’s first opera, which he began in 1917 and completed in draft two years later, shortly before he began work on his First Symphony, the famous Gothic. The orchestration of The Tigers seems to have been completed piecemeal over the following decade, but the opera was never performed in Brian’s lifetime. After the full score surfaced, the BBC eventually put on a studio performance, conducted by Lionel Friend, in 1983, and it’s a recording of that which now appears on these discs.
The libretto was based on Brian’s own experiences as a conscript in the early years of the first world war. It’s a surreal, broadly comic, darkly satirical picaresque centred on a regiment of recruits, the Tigers of the title, during their training in the home counties in 1914. The text is wordy, the action discursive; it sometimes seems as if Brian’s experiences of the idiocies of warfare were too rich and too various to be contained within a single dramatic scheme, so that the result lacks focus. There are some fine set pieces – of which the prologue, which takes place on Hampstead Heath on an August Bank Holiday, is one of the best. Much of the music is extremely proficient, rampaging across boundaries of style (the first scene of the prologue culminates in a series of variations on the tune of the music hall song Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?) with almost Ives-like collisions and layerings. Had Brian had a chance to hear the work on stage, one suspects, he might have been able to refine his ideas, and make the whole thing dramatically clearer.
The BBC performance, with multiple roles taken by a cast which includes some of the finest British opera singers of the time, is immensely competent. There are no star performances as such, more a succession of cameos, but Friend gave the whole teeming performance real energy and drive. As transferred to disc, the recording sometimes seems vivid rather than refined; Brian fans, though, won’t worry too much about that.
